There comes no shortage of influencers looking to trade their followings, reach and engagements for a hotel room, a few accommodations or a complimentary meal.
These influencers can, of course, play a tremendous role in raising awareness of a particular area, but oftentimes the cost - including the time spent researching and negotiating with top social media users - continues to strain destination marketing organizations' marketing budgets.
For Visit Santa Barbara, social media-focused agency Sparkloft Media was able to secure strong influencer partners and social representation - without the time-consuming, costly efforts of proactively searching for appropriate influencers.
After two consecutive years of getting hit with fires and mudslides, Santa Barbara County’s tourism destinations were in need of a particularly powerful push to deliver the “we’re open” message. In order to bring tourism back, priority number one was changing misperceptions that the area’s natural beauty and tourism infrastructure had been adversely impacted.
Influencer marketing doesn’t appear to be going anywhere, even with the threat of social media platforms removing coveted likes from accounts. But, at what point is finding an eager traveler with a mobile phone too much of a liability for local DMO?
Here's how we recruited the most effective travel influencers to support Visit Santa Barbara.
Selling Santa Barbara’s beauty
Santa Barbara is an Instagrammer’s playground. With stylish hotels, trendy restaurants and beautiful backdrops from city to sea, Santa Barbara brings an aesthetic and ambiance easily admired in social media posts from influencers and non-influencers alike.
Despite this, Visit Santa Barbara has traditionally spent significant time and money each year reaching out to influencers to participate in campaigns and partnerships.
With the offer of exclusive, Instagram-worthy itineraries, influencers would come knocking, rather than the DMO shelling out larger influencer paydays and spending time actually pooling outside candidates.
Alex Goodwin
In an effort to innovate the process and shift the way our traditional programs have worked, we decided to leverage all the incredible, Instagram-worthy activities Santa Barbara has to offer to convince influencers to come to us, furthering Santa Barbara’s brand reach and buzz among online communities.
Instead of starting out looking for influencers, ensuring they’re free of red flags, negotiating with agents and scheduling time to meet, the DMO refreshed the influencer marketing industry, all while managing to save time and conserve budget.
To increase interest in potential partners, the message was clearly laid out to our targets: “Santa Barbara is the picturesque destination you - and your Instagram - have been waiting for!”
Creators were invited to apply for an exclusive privilege to participate in this opportunity. Santa Barbara promoted an application site with eye-catching social ads, including sneak peaks of three over-the-top tour itineraries up for grabs.
By enticing and aligning influencers with pillar-specific, buzzworthy itineraries, Santa Barbara aimed to leverage content created by the three selected influencers - on-the-ground content, video recaps and website articles - to drive awareness of the Santa Barbara brand as a unique, luxurious and exciting destination
It was important to eventually drive awareness of Santa Barbara as both a key destination and a unique lifestyle brand. With the offer of exclusive, Instagram-worthy itineraries, influencers would come knocking, rather than the DMO shelling out larger influencer paydays and spending time actually pooling outside candidates.
Managing that selective content: results matter
The three chosen influencers posted during their visits and were followed by a crew to capture the magic of their stay on camera. After the trips, recap videos were created for each influencer’s itinerary, highlighting their specific pillars, partners and activities.
Finally, to further extend the program’s results, long-form articles were created for the Santa Barbara website, shared across social platforms and partners like Visit California and 805 Living.
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The program saw nearly six million combined impressions and earned more than 350,000 engagements across social. Recap videos garnered 400,000-plus video views, while the Santa Barbara website saw more than 11,000 visitors directly from the program.
The standout success metric was the number of influencer applications received. Through social media promotion of the application and incredible itineraries, more than 220,000 individuals in the creative community were targeted, and more than 500 of those targets submitted an application.
Social media plays a tremendous role in the continued success of travel and tourism. As the medium continues to evolve, platform by platform, those DMOs willing to explore and experiment with different tactics will grow exponentially.